I put Middle Earth Journal in hiatus in May of 2008 and moved to Newshoggers.I temporarily reopened Middle Earth Journal when Newshoggers shut it's doors but I was invited to Participate at The Moderate Voice so Middle Earth Journal is once again in hiatus.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Can't decide on a candidate? Let the wapo do it for you

Commentary By
Jazz

One of the more interesting online tools I've seen for politics is up and running at the Washington Post. Choose Your Candidate is a series of 25 questions for members of each party where you questions are posed on various issues up for debate. The various candidates' answers are offered without identifying who gave the answer. For each selection you also input how important the issue is to you personally.

Being one of those wishy-washy, moderate independents I took both tests today. On the Democratic side I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised that the tool identified Bill Richardson as my ideal choice, with well over 30 points when none of the other choices came up to 20. One shocking bit was that Obama came in dead last on my results. I have been warming up to Obama lately so it was unexpected to see him rate so low.

On the GOP side it was a real head scratcher. My choices came in as basically a dead tie between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani! That's an odd matchup.

Sad to say, with the exception of Rudy, nobody lining up with my policy choices seems to be in the running. Ah well... I'm not letting a web site determine my vote anyway.

I was also surprised by the results of my survey - favoring Edwards heavily on the D side and going Ron Paul on the R's with a big #2 in Huckabee?!?!?Leaving Kucinich out is a travesty.Also, the party line on both sides is evident, and pathetic. This survey does one thing well - prove the need for a lot more political parties.

A GLARING absence of Dennis Kucinich. The poll is purposefully bias, and useless, on the Democratic side because of the deliberate, and glaring, absence of Mr. Kucinich, the obviously dangerous little-big man.

...researchers at California’s Sonoma State University took a close look at the resumes of the 118 people who sit on the boards of directors of America’s ten largest media organizations, (including The Washington Post.) The research team is part of the Project Censored, which for nearly three decades has been exposing journalistic self-censorship — “the news that didn’t make the News.” They determined that the group of 118 board members in turn sit on the boards of 288 other major corporations. They also discovered that eight out of the ten media behemoths share common memberships in each other’s boardrooms.

Keep in mind that the other 288 corporations referred to include all of the military industrial, extractive, pharmaceutical, managed-care HMOs, ag-chem, et al corporations - In other words, all the corporations that are profiting from the war, and the corporate take-over of all of “our” federal regulatory agencies, et al.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.